Did ‘the powers that be’ decide that pursuing the best leads after the Lockerbie bombing, aka/Pan Am Flight 103, was politically inconvenient? According to this analysis by Pierre Prier of France’s Le Figaro, the need to keep Iran and Syria ‘on board’ during the first Gulf War may have resulted in resort to a convenient scape goat: Libyan intelligence agent Abdel Basset al-Megrahi.
For Le Figaro, Pierre Prier writes in part:
The U.N. representative at the first trial, Hans Köchler, is equally confident that investigators and judges in 2001 voluntarily abandoned the most promising path of evidence, which led to Syria and Iran. The motive: after the accidental destruction of an Iranian Airbus by an American warship [Iran Air Flight 655] five months before Lockerbie, the Ayatollah Khomeini promised America ‘a rain of blood.’ The investigation first led to a dissident Palestinian group with offices in Syria, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command. Two months before the attack, a cell of the PFLP-GC had been dismantled in Germany. During the operation, police seized a vacuum detonator of the type that is triggered when an aircraft reaches cruising altitude – a design that corresponds to the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103. But according to supporters of Libya’s innocence, the West needed Iranian neutrality and the active support of Syria during the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein.”
By Pierre Prier
Translated By Mary Kenney
August 22, 2009
France – Le Monde – Original Article (French)
Based on medical compassion, the return to Libya of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, the Libyan intelligence agent condemned to life in prison for the Lockerbie bombing, has provoked the ire of many of the victims’ families. “I have a lump in my throat. I want to vomit,” said Norma Malowski, who lost her daughter in the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988. But other relatives of the victims found no fault. Dr. Jim Swire, a Briton who also lost a daughter in the explosion, repeated for the hundredth time his personal conviction: “I don’t believe for a second that this man was involved in what he is accused of.”
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